You heard that Buddhism had become very important to him. It got riskily close to human feelings, a book with no coolness toward itself. It retained from his earlier work what Lynne Tillman called his "exuberantly weird" style, but its stories seemed important, capacious. Then, in 2013, Saunders published "Tenth of December," a collection that became a major literary event.
They were parodies of a culture whose essential language was already parody they were full of inventive formal rebellions, long after any truly stable form of mainstream fiction remained against which to rebel. The world was still going to its peculiar corporate hell. Their early books ("Pastoralia," "The Broom of the System," "Strong Motion," "Look at Me") were satirical, clever and humane, and seethed with frustration that that wasn't enough. It was the same unsettled quality to be found in the early fiction of his generational cohort, all of them also brilliant: Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, David Foster Wallace. They were brilliant - he won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 - and somehow also wrong, at least to me. There's a bitter tang to the first 20 or so stories that George Saunders published, across three lauded collections between 1996 to 2006.
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